If I a produce an artwork from activities such as walking and bouldering, then it takes characteristic shape either as an event or as a piece of documentation. If I’m expected to show something in a gallery space, then actual walking around the escarpment or bouldering on nearby rocks can scarcely literally take place – so the obvious recourse is documentation. The artwork emerges neither as event or as documentation but in the structured relation between the two.
I’m considering avoiding documentation in a current project. Which also means that I must avoid any reference to a prior, unrecoverable event or activity, Rather than highlight the dimension of action, rather than fetishize it through documentation, I must allow it to slip away. Opting for a probably more traditional approach, I am thinking of producing an actual sculptural work – one that represents an indirect and abstracted relation to dimensions of experience.
Here is a sketch for the work:
And here is what I have written above, since my handwriting is fairly illegible:
Sun in the Forest
A piece of colourbond steel guttering suspended from the roof with an ornate sun pattern cut in its lower end. A spotlight above casts light down through the pattern on to a set of plastic buckets full of leaves.
An effort to draw together some things – forest, sun, a home renovation project. The work is legible in terms of contemporary environmental issues – in terms of the collapse, for instance, of notions of pristine, authentic nature and the emergence of new points of coincidence between human and cosmological time. Yet it is not really intended as a cryptic riddle that demands some neatly coherent reading. The various elements within it take shape, for me, more as idee fixees than as calmly legible semantic symbols. It is the poetic juxtaposition of materials and the formal architecture of their encounter that interests me.
This solution – the production of a sculptural installation work – is hardly novel, but let’s see what can be done with it. No doubt the awkward relation between event and documentation cannot be entirely repressed. It will find its way within the work.